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Three Sisters, Like on Anton chekhov's Stage and Woody Allen's set, dominate the screen of , one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces. Thanks to his extraordinary artistic sensitivity to the minutest details of his characters' complex psychologies, his film is a powerful exploration of one of those deep-rooted family knots where love is inextricably(con)fused with cruelty, and neediness with anguish. The Swedish director's women—Agnes, Karin, and Maria—and the wonderful actors playing them—Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann, respectively—are entrapped inside an even bleaker universe of suffering, emotional no less than physical, than those of either the Russian playwright or the New York comedian.
The sisters' agonizing pains—their cries and their whispers,1 no less than their secrets and their lies—are inside them. Agnes's body is devastated by the cancer from which she is dying. Maria's mind is troubled by her neurotic compulsion to manipulate and exploit those nearest to her for her own selfish gratification. Karin's disordered personality is affected by such a paralyzing coldness of heart that it deprives her of any capacity for humane gestures or words of comfort, a “kind of rigid inflexibility and aversion to intimacy that can only come from being irreparably emotionally